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https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-33_11
Copy to Clipboard. Add italics as necessaryCite as: Marta Aleksandrowicz, ‘Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage’, in Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 263–85 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.37050/​ci-33_11>
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Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human MontageMarta AleksandrowiczORCID

Abstract

This essay explores the psychoanalytic work of Willy Apollon, and the creative work of Lygia Clark and Clarice Lispector, to rethink the human through an aesthetic lens. While Apollon locates the human outside the cultural montage that controls creativity and desire, Clark’s sculpture Bichos and Lispector’s novel The Passion According to G.H. model the human as a different, transindividual kind of montage through the aesthetic practice of breaking prevailing models of language, subjectivity, and sculpture.

Keywords: montage; aesthetic; psychoanalysis; Willy Apollon; Lygia Clark; Clarice Lispector

Introduction

This essay engages with the recent advances in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis developed at GIFRIC (the Interdisciplinary Freudian Group for Research and Clinical and Cultural Interventions) and EFQ (the Freudian School of Quebec) in Canada, and places them in conversation with works by two Brazilian artists and contemporaries, Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark.1 I situate my discussion within this specific constellation of artists, clinicians, and scholars to argue that their work enables us to conceive a model of the human in opposition to an individualistic, anthropocentric model based on exclusionary hierarchies that separate humans from other human and other-than-human beings. Indeed, this new model — which I introduce here by way of short vignettes drawn from my engagement with the work of Haitian psychoanalyst and leading member of GIFRIC and the EFQ, Willy Apollon, Lispector’s novel A paixão segundo G.H. (The Passion According to G.H.), and Clark’s sculpture series Bichos — neither breaksBeginning of page[p. 264] with the category of the human nor replaces it with another, for instance posthuman, model of subjectivity. Not only does it not dispense with the human but it also paradoxically and counterintuitively reconceives humanity as, in fact, antithetical to atomistic identity and self-interested individualism.2 Furthermore, I propose that, in addition to offering a particular understanding of the human, this model also entails a particular logic and structure, with an important aesthetic dimension that goes beyond what Apollon and Lispector respectively call the ‘cultural montage’ and the ‘human montage’.

For Apollon, the human subject emerges through a rupturing encounter with ‘exteriority’ and ‘strangeness’; this is especially pronounced in his earlier work.3 In blurring the boundary between inside and outside, this rupture effectively places the human at odds with the prevailing model of the human subject as a self-enclosed individual. The latter model, I suggest, drawing on Apollon’s work, belongs to the domain of the cultural montage (montage culturel), which works toBeginning of page[p. 265] delimit and guard the borders of what can be perceived, included, and recognized in so-called consensual, collective reality.4

Indeed, the term ‘montage’ is mainly associated with the creative techniques of editing developed by Soviet montage theory and other avant-garde movements, such as Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. As I will discuss below, the creative techniques of ‘montaging’ are also crucial to Lispector’s literary writing and Clark’s sculpture. However, Apollon’s unusual use of the term instead indicates a construction and configuration of reality that is built on and reinforced through culture, which organizes the social bond and life in the collective through an assemblage of norms, ideals, and prohibitions, and which, by doing so, works to repress and control the human. As Tracy McNulty has noted in her discussion of Apollon’s work, culture in this perspective is understood specifically as founded on ‘a rule that censors the human in every human being in order to guarantee its own material and ideological reproduction’.5 The human in every human being is linked to the unconscious dimension of desire, creativity, and the drive.Beginning of page[p. 266]

The creative technique of montage pertains to the work of selecting, assembling, cutting, pasting, curating, and putting together heterogeneous fragments, pieces, and textures, which are juxtaposed to produce something new and unprecedented. Conversely, the cultural montage points to a more hermetic construction that is ‘sewn’ and ‘fixed’ together from an ensemble of norms, rules, and ideals to control and limit human creativity and desire.6 Even if its architecture might appear malleable and dynamic, since norms and ideals shift according to sociocultural context, reproduction and preservation of this montage ultimately depends on the exclusion of the aforementioned dimension of exteriority and strangeness, and the installation of the closed model of the human. If aesthetic production — which Fernanda Negrete’s commentary on Apollon’s work describes as ‘a fundamentally creative “out of bounds”’7 — is in opposition to the cultural montage, it is because it creates a path for the welcoming and expression of strangeness and exteriority from the limits of atomistic identity and language. Mobilized by the work of unconscious desire and the drive, aesthetic production thus becomes a way of reshaping and redefining reality out-of-bounds: beyond and against the cultural montage. Importantly, aesthetic production is not limited to artists but rather is available to all. Furthermore, not only is it not limited to artists, but it is also not equivalent to all artistic production; indeed, some artistic production is circumscribed within the norms and ideals of a given cultural construction of reality, and is effectively complicit in reinforcing censorship of creativity and desire. If, in this essay, I nonetheless engage the artistic projects of Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark,Beginning of page[p. 267] it is because I approach their artworks as distinct aesthetic practices of modelling (of what is) beyond the cultural montage.

Indeed, while Apollon’s work places the human in opposition to the cultural montage, Lispector’s literary project, as it becomes explicit in The Passion According to G.H. (1964), is committed to modelling the human beyond what G.H., the novel’s narrator, labels as the ‘human montage’ (montagem humana) and ‘false humanization’ supported by anthropocentric, sexist, racist, and classist norms, ideals, and values.8 Lispector’s novel stages the disintegration of this montage through a disquieting encounter with ‘the inhuman’ (inumano), which brings G.H. to the limits of language, intellectual or conceptual understanding, and individual existence.9 At the same time, I propose that Lispector does not abandon or dissolve the human altogether, but rather creates a new model of the human on the aesthetic plane of writing — as a distinct practice of assembling and piecing together in a language that breaks and is reinvented at its limits.

Around the time of the publication of The Passion, Lispector’s contemporary, Lygia Clark, who co-founded the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement and worked at the intersection of art and the clinic, created a series of sculptures called Bichos.10 According to the ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ (1959), art is not ‘a “machine” or […] an “object”’, but rather a ‘living […] aesthetic organism’ that revives and spatializes the ‘experience of the real’.11 Likewise, the bicho — as Clark herselfBeginning of page[p. 268] describes it — is to be approached as ‘a living organism, a work essentially active’.12 The term bicho has wide-ranging associations and has been variously translated into English as ‘beast’, ‘animal’, ‘critter’, and ‘bug’, attesting to its ambiguous taxonomy.13 Clark’s series comprises around seventy sculptures that enter into haptic interactions with human participants, who are in turn invited to interact with the bichos as well. As dynamic and participatory sculptural configurations, the bichos — individually and as a series — form a montage that is qualitatively opposed to Apollon’s notion of the cultural montage, as well as to the human montage that Lispector’s literary practice dismantles.

I argue here that in Apollon, Lispector, and Clark’s work it is thus possible to register several different understandings and structures of the montage. Apollon situates the human (and the psychoanalytic model of the human) outside the cultural montage that reproduces the frame of consensual reality through a matrix of norms, ideals, and prohibitions. Meanwhile, Clark’s sculpture — and ultimately, I suggest, Lispector’s literary writing — enables us to redefine the human as a distinct kind of montage that unfolds through the aesthetic practice of montaging.14 While the first montage resembles a self-reinforcing feedback loop that maintains pre-existent reality and its anthropocentric, individualistic, closed model of the human, the second is heterogeneous, dynamic, and in-the-making. These two kinds of montage are not only linked to two different models of the human but also ultimately to two different ‘models of models’.15Beginning of page[p. 269]

Model outside the Montage

As already stated, Apollon’s work defines the human in terms of the rupture — or what he calls the ‘effraction’ — provoked by the confrontation with strangeness and exteriority.16 Never named in language and available neither to scientific observation nor to a socially authorized field of perception, the experience of the rupture escapes attempts to ‘place the human subject in the position of an object — one thing among others in a space that is defined and controlled’.17 According to this psychoanalytic model, what is then paradoxically most singular and intimate in each human is, in a way, constituted by its outside. To nonetheless try to visualize this effraction topologically, it might be useful to refer to the model of the Möbius strip (Figure 1), as mobilized by Jacques Lacan for thinking about human subjectivity.18

FIG. 1. A Möbius strip. Photo by David Benbennick <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%B6bius_Strip.jpg>.
Fig. 1. A Möbius strip. Photo by David Benbennick <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%B6bius_Strip.jpg>.

Sasha J. Langford observes that ‘unlike the unilinear time of the line graph — which can only register quantifiable, positively-affirmed [sic] data — Lacan’s use of topology […] offers the possibility to account for aspects of experience that evade verifiable appearance within conscious life’, as well as for ‘the multiple localisation of the subject’.19 Although the Möbius strip model muddles the boundary — or even the very categories — of inside and outside, it does not entirely dissolve this boundary by merging the two sides of the strip into undifferentiated sameness. Its non-orientable, liminal quality can thus perhaps help to visualize the effects of the effraction that blurs this boundary as well, but in a way that is specific and singular to each subject.Beginning of page[p. 270]

Drawing on Apollon’s work, Jeffrey Librett characterizes effraction as ‘the breaking-in or breaking-out of something unnatural in the natural’.20 Indeed, this rupture by a strange intensity — which lacks an image, object, form, concept, and a name in the existing field of reality — inserts the human into a logic other than that which aims to ensure the good functioning of the organism. This unconscious logic of desire and the drive — which the rupture inaugurates — pushes the human to ‘go too far, to seek out that Thing that goes beyond the reasonable’ and beyond the ‘logic of the living organism’.21 In pushing too far, desire and the drive also place the human outside the prevailing model of the human established by the cultural montage and reinforced by the norms, ideals, and, finally, language that delineate the frontiers of the receivable, the perceptible, and the acceptable in the social link. This prevailing model defines the human as an individual whose self-interest and unity are pursued through an appropriative andBeginning of page[p. 271] oppositional relation to others and alienation in sociocultural identifications and demands.

Language, however, seems to occupy an ambiguous, liminal position in relation to the cultural montage. Even though it is deployed by the montage to organize collective reality and to alienate individuals in a matrix of norms, ideals, and limits that place them in a hierarchical relation to other humans and all other beings, at the same time it also paradoxically testifies to the capacity to create. As Negrete observes in her commentary on Apollon’s work, ‘for language to emerge, humans had to have the capacity to invent it in the first place’.22 Far from conscious intentionality, this inventive capacity is linked to the unconscious desire that seeks to access and produce something that breaks the frame of established reality. Indeed, language would not have emerged were it not for the creativity of ‘representations’ arising in response to the rupture, for which there is no pre-existent name and no pre-existent image, and which Apollon defines as ‘the capacity to represent the environment […] otherwise than it is’.23 Thus, the creative capacity that gave rise to the development of language at the same time also ‘exceeds the framework that humans establish through language’.24

The rupturing encounter with exteriority and strangeness is thus ultimately linked to the inauguration of a desire for aesthetic production: to give form to something that is not pre-given in reality, and to share it with others from the limits of language and one’s existence as an individual.25 If the aesthetic becomes crucial for challenging and disrupting the individualistic model deployed by the cultural montage, it is because it forges a path for the expression of this rupturing experience in a way that manifests a paradoxically transindividual dimension of the human.26 This transindividual dimension — resonant with whatBeginning of page[p. 272] Lispector will refer to as the ‘impersonal’ — is linked precisely to the fact that humanity shares the experience that is singular and specific to each subject, but that cannot be claimed by anyone as their personal property or private territory.27 In other words, this experience transcends the individual and does not belong to anyone in particular. Or, as Freud discovered in relation to the unconscious, it belongs to ‘another scene’ (ein anderer Schauplatz).28 I suggest that, by opposing the human to self-enclosed and self-interested individuality, this transindividual dimension testifies to the specificity of human experience while at the same time it undermines human exceptionalism, that is, claims to the moral supremacy and authority of human over other-than-human life forms, based on the view of the human as an atomized, self-aware agent.29 Indeed, it is ultimately on this transindividual basis that new linkages, modes of relation, and models of the human can emerge.

Model as the Montage

Breaking and Making Language

Published on the cusp of the military coup in Brazil, Lispector’s 1964 novel The Passion According to G.H. is narrated by G.H., a bourgeois woman, sculptor, and writer living in Rio de Janeiro, who tells theBeginning of page[p. 273] story of the disintegration of her ‘human montage’.30 The human montage here rests on the oppositional, hierarchical logic of mastery and individualism, reinforced by an umbrella of sexist, racist, and classist norms, ideals, and values. As already stated, the fall of the montage is provoked by G.H.’s rupture by the ‘inhuman’, which pertains not only to other-than-human life forms and those marginalized figures excluded from access to humanity as defined by the human montage, but also to the ‘unsayable’ dimension of subjectivity and experience that this montage cannot appropriate and capture.31 Thus, while the inhuman is opposed to the montage, it is paradoxically not opposed to the human as such. Rather, it becomes integral to the articulation of a new model of the human.

The disintegration of the montage begins with G.H.’s visit to her maid’s chamber, where she discovers a mural that Janair, her Black former housemaid, drew on the wall before her departure.32 The maid’s ‘gaze’, which persists through the mural, haunts and interrogates G.H.’s field of vision, bringing her sense of stability, identity, and normalcy into crisis.33 Indeed, it confronts the narrator with the appearance of what Lucia Villares has discussed as the ‘symptoms of unexamined whiteness’.34 Villares places these symptoms in the context ofBeginning of page[p. 274] discourses of hybridity, miscegenation, and racial democracy that were prevalent in Brazil around the time when Lispector was writing, as a result of which racist policies and language seemed to disappear from Brazil’s public domain, with racism effectively relegated to the ‘zone of the unspeakable and therefore unacknowledged and unquestioned’.35 When her unexamined whiteness is unveiled, G.H.’s human montage indeed begins to collapse, and so does narrative and linguistic coherence.

The dismantling of the human montage culminates in the narrator’s encounter with a cockroach. Following the encounter with Janair’s mural, G.H. opens the wardrobe door and is confronted with the insect, whose ‘sudden life’ startles her.36 She slams the door on the cockroach’s ‘half-emerged body’ and, soon after, white pus starts to ooze out of the animal’s crushed entrails.37 While the narrator’s discovery of the mural in Janair’s chamber marks the beginning of the disintegration of her human montage, the culmination of this is her discovery that the ‘narrow route’ she must take in order to complete her entry into the chamber passes through the cockroach.38 She thus squeezes through the animal’s body and eventually puts this body in her mouth.39Beginning of page[p. 275]

In confronting the narrator with the strange, ‘impersonal soul’ of her own being, which can no longer be ‘forsaken’ for the ‘persona’ and the ‘human mask’, the encounter with the cockroach ruptures G.H.’s identity, thought, and language, turning them inside out.40 If the encounter with the cockroach is nauseating or even revolting for G.H., this is not merely because of its associations with impurity, but rather because of its depersonalizing effect. Indeed, in the final pages of the novel, G.H. finds herself on the plane of ‘depersonalization’, wherein ‘the dismissal of useless individuality’ by ‘the greatest exteriorization’ may be reached.41 Through the movement of depersonalization, G.H. extends and stretches herself outward, as it were, which pushes her to recognize ‘the woman of all women’ and ‘the man of all men’ in herself, as well as to further discover that the ‘single roach’ she stumbled upon in the chamber is not only ‘the roach of all roaches’ but also the ‘world’.42

Indeed, the cockroach here becomes an agent of depersonalization not simply because it is an animal but because its ‘awareness of living’ is so ‘neutral’ and disinterested — at least from the perspective of the self-interested, hierarchical logics and scales of the human montage — that it is unbounded and encompasses the world.43 The magnitude of this ‘attention-life’, signalled by the ‘heralding quiver’ of the cockroach’s antennae, requires a creative practice that can sustain and relay this attention on the plane of writing.44 Indeed, in pushing G.H. toward ‘the actual process of life’ and ‘watchful life living itself’, this depersonalizing encounter calls for a new practice of writing that requires the writer to grow the antennae, as it were, in order to register, translate, and transmit the world’s ‘telegraph signals’.45 The writer’s task is to translate the ‘unknown telegraph signals’ into a new, unknown language as the basis of new linkages and, I would suggest, as the basis of a new modelBeginning of page[p. 276] of the human.46 And because telegraph lines send information by making and breaking electrical connections, the transmission of telegraph signals requires a kind of writing that breaks and makes (models of) language.

Near the end of the novel, narrating from the ruins of the human montage, G.H. describes the human in terms of a failure of language to articulate the inhuman and ‘the unsayable’.47 She proclaims: ‘reality is the raw material, language is the way I go in search of it […] and the way I do not find it’; language is ‘my human effort’.48 Importantly, human effort does not involve merely acknowledging the failure of language — trying to ‘take a shortcut and want[ing] to start, already knowing that the voice says little […] straightaway with being depersonal’ — but rather following the way that language breaks. 49 The point which, I think, is crucial to the novel’s rearticulation of the human is that depersonalization is not the effect of a conscious decision or intention, but rather a consequence of following the way that language fails as it seeks to express the unsayable and the inhuman. ‘The unsayable’, G.H. concludes, ‘can only be given to me through the failure of my language. Only when the construction fails, can I obtain what it could not achieve.’50 Indeed, when one follows the way that language breaks, one also encounters an opening in language that stretches it beyond its function as a prop within the human montage.

To approach the unsayable and the inhuman is not to make the ‘impalpable […] concrete’ but to ‘designate the impalpable as impalpable, and then the breath breaks out anew as in a candle’s flame’.51 Such a writing practice differs from those practices of ‘Western writing’ that Apollon discusses in his study of the relationship between writing and the ‘voices’ in Haitian Vodou. For Apollon, Western writing is often an instrument of conquest, which extends its domination by producing ‘a remainder’ that it then ‘conquers by bringing into a signifying (andBeginning of page[p. 277] thus conventional and profitable) unit’.52 A remainder is ‘a yet uncultured nature, a promised land, the shifting horizon of a planned voyage’, and ‘a wilderness to conquer, multiply, add up, spend, and accumulate’.53 Lispector’s (and G.H.’s) literary practice of searching and failing to find words with which one could articulate and relay the unsayable and the inhuman testifies to a kind of writing which does not endlessly produce a remainder that it then attempts to make familiar within the discourse of the montage, only to start the conquest all over again. As the ‘limit point or fissure’ that suspends ‘unitary discourses’, the unsayable and the inhuman in Lispector’s literary practice are not produced on the plane of writing, but rather encountered as something that cannot be encapsulated by representation and the narrative framework.54 The encounter with this limit point is a herald, or source, of writing. Indeed, although the aesthetic can take different forms — as, for example, a political act that affirms solidarity with the transindividual dimension of the human, rather than aiming to solidify or safeguard one’s position within the montage — literary writing is unique because it is by means of words themselves that it exposes language’s failure to domesticate or evacuate what Apollon refers to as ‘the stranger’ that ‘makes familiarity impossible’.55 And, as already stated, this manifestation of the failure of language can also defamiliarize language and stretch it beyond its role of naming and adjudicating what is possible to say and write in a socially authorized reality.Beginning of page[p. 278]

Breaking and Making Sculpture

If Lispector stretches language, Lygia Clark stretches vision to spatialize metamorphosis and new modes of relation. In the 1960s, Clark created a series of participatory sculptures entitled Bichos. These were made from a variety of materials, including steel and aluminium, and in a variety of colours, shapes, and sizes (Figure 2). Each bicho was given a distinct name.

FIG. 2. Lygia Clark, O Bicho Linear (1960), aluminium, variable dimensions
Fig. 2. Lygia Clark, O Bicho Linear (1960), aluminium, variable dimensions <https:/​/​commons.wikimedia.org/​wiki/​File:O_Bicho_Linear_-_Lygia_Clark.jpg>

The planes of the bichos are connected with hinges, allowing the sculptures to be moved by their human handlers in manifold ways. As already stated, with its ambiguous taxonomy — as, variously, ‘beast’, ‘animal’, or ‘critter’ — bicho points to the other-than-human, yet, as a dynamic and participatory form, it also enters into haptic, sensory interactions with the human participant. It is through touching it, playing with it, folding it, and turning it, that the bicho is shaped. It is thus open to transformation. However, as Clark remarks, the bicho is ‘not composed of still, independent forms that can be indefinitely handled at will’; ‘On the contrary, its parts are functionally related to each other.’56 Indeed, although the sculptural body of the bicho is agile and malleable, it is at the same time also a very specific, concrete configurationBeginning of page[p. 279] whose distinct logic of movement and temporality resists domination. It is, as Clark writes, ‘an organic entity that fully reveals itself within its inner time of expression’.57 The bicho reveals itself in the here and now as a heterogeneous, dynamic present that does not stagnantly repeat the past, especially if we understand the latter as a static, immutable corpse. Indeed, if, for Clark, ‘the only thing that matters’ is ‘the act-in-progress’, then the bicho is the act that sculpts the continuously unfolding now through a haptic encounter with the participant.58

The bicho’s temporal-aesthetic plane urges the human participant to transcend their existence as a self-enclosed individual, thus enabling what Leo Bersani, in his discussion of the aesthetic, describes as ‘a different relation to otherness, not one based in paranoid fascination’, but rather in ‘a communication of forms, as a kind of universal solidarity not of identities but of positionings and configurations in space’.59 IfBeginning of page[p. 280] Neo-Concrete poetry insisted on restoring the word to ‘its condition as “verbum”, that is, to the human mode of presentation of the real’ — rather than taking the word as an ‘object’ transformed into a ‘mere optical signal’ — the bicho can be thought of as the verbum that sculpts and stretches the visual field beyond the predetermined parameters of movement, visibility, and conceivability, enabling new linkages and communications of forms to be registered in visual space.60 The bicho, as a construction, thus forms a montage that is qualitatively opposed to the ‘cultural’ and ‘humanized’ montage in Apollon and Lispector’s work. Indeed, Clark’s artwork brings to mind the practice of montage in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, which, as Elena Vogman observes, is to be approached not simply as the ‘relocation of an isolated fragment within a new structural relation but also […] a potential mode of shifting the perspective, of producing a new visibility’.61 Although Clark’s sculpture leaves the relationship between the human and the bicho open-ended, I suggest that it nonetheless enables us to spatialize the human as the construction of a new haptic and visual perspective.

While Lispector breaks with any pre-existent model or theory of language that defines it as a means of unification, codification, or standardization, Clark in turn breaks with a static, closed model of sculpture. If, in Lispector’s Passion, it is the pre-existent model of language that needs to break in order for it to be transformed beyond the prescriptive, repressive logic and structure of the human montage, for Clark it is a closed model of sculpture that needs to break in order for it to be transformed in a way that expands the visual, haptic, relational field beyond the frontiers of a socially authorized field of perception. Writing and sculpting thus both become distinct aesthetic practices of breaking models deployed by the montage, and I propose that on this basis they enable a modelling of the human as a new, transindividual kind of montage. This transindividual montage is supported by the rifts in language, atomistic identity, and linear time that are provoked by the encounter with what Apollon, Lispector, and Clark variously describe as strange exteriority, the inhuman, and the bicho. This montage notBeginning of page[p. 281] only disrupts the anthropocentric, individualistic model of the human, but also problematizes other models that risk freezing the human on either side of the historically, culturally, socially, or economically predetermined subject/object, oppressor/victim binary. Indeed, despite the undeniable urgency of change in the field of authority and power relations, such models, as observed by the Chicana writer, feminist, and poet Gloria Anzaldúa, risk locking the human into ‘a duel of oppressor and oppressed […] like the cop and the criminal’, perpetually reducing each to ‘a common denominator of violence’.62

Because the two kinds of montages discussed in this paper operate on the basis of a different conception of the human as well as entail a different logic and structure, they are ultimately linked to two disparate kinds and conceptualizations of models. On the one side, there is a self-referential, self-contained model (think of a closed sphere) that represents, replicates, and reinforces a socially authorized field of perception, sensation, language, and identity. On the other side, there is a heterogeneous, transindividual model, which muddles the boundary between inside and outside and emerges at the limit and point of breakage of the first model. One reifies the past as an always-already-there, predetermined given, the other is the act-in-progress. The latter would perhaps not be possible if it were not for the aesthetic: as a way of modelling beyond the established parameters of visibility, reality, and language, and against the prevailing models of individualism, exceptionalism, and ‘false humanization’.63Beginning of page[p. 283]

Response by Mark Anthony Cayanan: Lyric Disconcertion and the Human In-the-Making

One of the most thrillingly disorienting poems I remember reading when I was younger is ‘Vertigo’ by American poet Jorie Graham.64 The poem begins in medias res, bypassing exposition in typical lyric fashion: ‘Then they came to the very edge of the cliff and looked down.’ From there, the poem zeroes in on a female figure as it renders what she can perceive from her vantage point, in a manner that seems intent on hyper-precision, into a contact zone between the physical world and herself, her limits, ‘where the mind open[s] out / into the sheer drop of its intelligence’. And in a move characteristic of Graham’s body of work, ‘Vertigo’ stretches the notion of lyric time, decelerating it by deploying the structural elements of poetry — word choice, of course, but also syntax, lineation, and typography — to atomize the instance of encounter between the human and the nonhuman other, wherein the former’s sensory awareness accrues (or refuses to accrue) into apprehension: ‘How does one enter / a story?’ the poem asks. The deceleration of the narrative moment leads, paradoxically, to an acceleration of the pace with which language reaches out to its audience, enacting the frantic acrobatics of the mind as it registers the ineffable.

I conjure up the poem now in relation to Marta Aleksandrowicz’s essay, where she constellates the propositions of Willy Apollon with the literary and artistic productions of Clarice Lispector and Lygia Clark, distinct in their proclivity for defamiliarizing practices which do not necessarily scuttle towards linguistic or formal stability. Pointing out that the prevalent model of the human is rigid and ‘self-contained’ — locked within and reinforced by culturally legible and socially sanctioned codes of ‘perception, sensation, language, and identity’ — Marta establishes a ‘heterogeneous, transindividual’ model that lies in a liminal state of unfolding, indefinitely realizable rather than realized.

One key component to the infrastructure of Marta’s argument is its discussion of ‘effraction’, a notion drawn from Apollon: the ‘in-the-making’ quality of the model tendered by Marta emerges fromBeginning of page[p. 284] it, which she describes as ‘this rupture by strange intensity — which lacks an image, object, form, concept, and a name in the existing field of reality — [that] inserts the human into a logic other than that which aims to ensure the good functioning of the organism’. Effraction, in Marta’s essay, precipitates a desire on the part of the human to accommodate that which is not within the realm of established reality, thus catalysing the ‘disintegration’ of the human montage. This desire, to channel the words of Lispector’s protagonist, creates paradoxical effects: ‘the unsayable […] can only be given to me through the failure of my language.’

I find Marta’s discussion especially beguiling because I detect in it a decided compatibility with the kind of lyric work that fascinates me, the kind I must have first detected, as a young reader, in ‘Vertigo’, in which conventional syntactic manoeuvres prove ineffective and thus need to be disrupted, reassembled in unpredictable ways, given the confrontation of the anomalous, the incomprehensible. In Graham’s poem, the disruptive encounter is staged through the excitable plasticity of the sentences, the deliberately haphazard line breaks and indentions, the intrusions of asides and questions in a hurried exposition that turns omnivorous in its attempt to accommodate the experience in its entirety, in its ongoing presentness, which Anahid Nersessian describes as ‘the ridged quality of a real body in space’.65 Graham — in tracking the desire of the female figure to comprehend, to confer upon what she sees from the cliff a definition ensconced within human parameters — summons a catalogue of open-ended questions:

What was it in there
she could hear
that has nothing to do with telling the truth?
What was it that was not her listening?
She leaned out. What is it pulls at one, she wondered,
what? That it has no shape but point of view?
That it cannot move to hold us?

Beginning of page

[p. 285]

The poem’s emphasis on hewing to the unravelling moment as faithfully as possible ostensibly collapses into futility, with the recognition of how the body ‘cannot / follow, cannot love’. However, deploying the generosity of Marta’s model of the human as a frame for Graham’s poem allows for a wonderful and — consistent with Marta’s argument — incongruous clearing: the alienating experience of the female figure while on top of a cliff thrusts her will, as well as the body which attends to it, into a state, ‘as if for the first time’, where the stable notion of the human dissolves and words like ‘follow’ and ‘love’ are flung towards alternative, potential definitions. ‘And what if after so many words, / the word itself doesn’t survive!’, the Peruvian poet César Vallejo pronounces.66 This scenario, twisted to become both question and exclamation, certainly seems apropos to Graham, via Marta: ‘Vertigo’, in ‘follow[ing] the way language breaks’, illustrates how Marta’s model also offers a compelling means of approaching and understanding poetry’s obsessive drive to test language, to find ways to stand close to its hypothetical cliff, the human trying to reach for — to ‘love’ — an other whose existence is beyond her physical and mental domain, this human who scrambles to follow what she cannot follow, the language following the language which does not survive, with the human following after.

Notes

  1. I would like to thank my colleagues at the ICI Berlin for their valuable comments on previous drafts of this paper. ↵
  2. This paper is an effect of my attempt to creatively engage with psychoanalytic, literary, and sculptural material in order to rethink the model (not only that of the human, but also the model as such) through an aesthetic lens. Within this scope, I focus here — especially in the case of Apollon and Lispector’s work — on attempting to glean the aesthetic model from selected scenes and vignettes, rather than on providing a comprehensive exposition or summary of this extensive and complex material. ↵
  3. Willy Apollon, ‘The Limit: A Fundamental Question for the Subject in the Human Experience’, in Borderlines in Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jeffrey Librett, special issue of Konturen, 3 (2010), pp. 103–18 (p. 106) <https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.3.1.1391>. Apollon’s earlier work, which I mainly draw on in this essay, discusses the human in terms of the encounter with the unnameable strangeness and exteriority of the voice, or more specifically the ‘unpresentable object of the voice of the Other’ (Apollon, ‘The Limit’, p. 112). His recent work focuses more on approaching the human in terms of the ‘spirit’. The spirit (as in the French esprit or German Geist) has an aesthetic dimension and is linked to speech as the ‘power of representation and creation’; furthermore, it is distinguished from both the ‘adaptive function’ of the psyche and the mind as a ‘register of cognition’ (Willy Apollon, ‘The Subject of the Quest’, trans. by Daniel Wilson, in Beauty, ed. by Marta Aleksandrowicz and Fernanda Negrete, special issue of Penumbr(a), 2 (2022), pp. 1–14 (pp. 5, 3) <https://www.penumbrajournal.org/no-2-beauty> [accessed 19 July 2024]). Apollon’s emphasis on the human experience of the voice and the spirit places its accent elsewhere from, for instance, Jacques Lacan’s discussion of the human in terms of entry into the world of the symbolic and the signifier. For more on this, see, for example, Tracy McNulty, ‘The Traversal of the Fantasy as an Opening to Humanity’, in Psychoanalysis and Solidarity, ed. by Michelle Rada, special issue of differences, 33.2–3 (2022), pp. 198–219 <https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10124760>. ↵
  4. This montage is undermined and thus increasingly guarded in the age of mondialisation, which Apollon distinguishes from globalization. While globalization is mainly linked to economic and industrial processes associated with global, neoliberal expansion, mondialisation refers to the consequences that an ongoing clash of different cultural and civilizational frameworks entails for human experience. Jeffrey Librett’s commentary on Apollon’s work translates mondialisation as ‘world-formation’. Mondialisation is amplified through intensifying migration and forced displacement due to a host of economic, political, military, and climate crises, as well as increasing urbanization, information wars, and the proliferation of conflicting cultural definitions of the human. In weakening the solidity of the cultural montage, mondialisation also testifies to something in the human that the definitions deployed by the montage cannot capture. For more on this, see Apollon, ‘The Subject of the Quest’; and Jeffrey Librett, ‘The Subject in the Age of World-Formation (Mondialisation): Advances in Lacanian Theory from the Québec Group’, in Innovations in Psychoanalysis: Originality, Development, Progress, ed. by Aner Govrin and Jon Mills (New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 75–100 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.4324/​9780367809560-5>. ↵
  5. McNulty, ‘The Traversal of the Fantasy’, p. 199. Although this is not the focus of my essay, it is worth stressing that Apollon’s metapsychology places a special emphasis on how the cultural montage specifically deploys sex as a medium through which, as McNulty notes, ‘every culture produces the man and the woman that it needs to reproduce itself’ (p. 199). Apollon points out that, in order to ensure reproduction by controlling desire, the montage must ‘organize itself both around and against the stakes of feminine jouissance’, as the ‘history of witchcraft […] will always be there to remind us of’ (Apollon, ‘The Subject of the Quest’, p. 11). ↵
  6. It is worth noting that Apollon works primarily in French, where montage refers not only to film, sound, and photo editing, but also to sewing clothes, fixing and installing appliances, or assembling furniture. See ‘Montage’, in Larousse Bilingual Dictionary (Paris: Larousse, n.d.) <https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-anglais/montage/52341> [accessed 30 March 2024]. Meanwhile, in Brazilian Portuguese, montagem, in addition to referring to film and photo editing techniques, also refers to the process or effect of putting together pieces of machinery, or arranging and presenting information in a specific sequence. See ‘Montagem’, in Dicionário Houaiss (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Antônio Houaiss, n.d.) <https://houaiss.uol.com.br/> [accessed 11 June 2024]. ↵
  7. Fernanda Negrete, ‘The Aesthetic Pass: Beauty and the End of Analysis’, in Psychoanalysis and Solidarity, ed. by Rada, pp. 220–41 (p. 229) <https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-10124774>. ↵
  8. Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H., trans. by Idra Novey (New York: Penguin, 2014), pp. 4, 165. Although Novey’s translation, referred to in this paper, renders montagem humana as ‘human setup’, I translate it as ‘human montage’ to retain the specificity of Lispector’s wording as well as to suggest that even though this montage is restrictive, prescriptive, and static, Lispector’s novel also opens up the possibility for another, generative understanding of the montage. While ‘setup’ reflects the first aspect of the montage, it fails to capture that montage refers first and foremost to an artistic technique and a form of creative construction, and thereby also fails to capture the affordances this might have for rethinking the human. ↵
  9. Ibid., p. 189. ‘The inhuman’ here carries multiple resonances, which I discuss in the third section of this essay. ↵
  10. Throughout her life, Clark became increasingly interested in exploring the potential of art for therapeutic practice. It is also worth noting that both Clark and Lispector were in analysis. See Christine Macel, ‘Lygia Clark: At the Border of Art’, in Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art 1948–1988, ed. by Cornelia H. Butler and Luis Pérez-Oramas (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), pp. 253–60; Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). ↵
  11. The Neo-Concrete manifesto opposes its approach to art to the mechanistic, rationalist notion present in concrete art. Ferreira Gullar and others, ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’ (Rio de Janeiro, March 1959) <https://391.org/manifestos/1959-neo-concrete-manifesto-ferreira-gullar/> [accessed 22 July 2024]. ↵
  12. Lygia Clark, ‘The Bichos’, in Lygia Clark, ed. by Butler and Pérez-Oramas, p. 160. ↵
  13. ‘Bicho’, in Linguee (Cologne: DeepL SE, n.d.) <https://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/search?source=portuguese&query=bicho> [accessed 5 January 2024]. ↵
  14. I would like to thank Tania Rivera for encouraging me to think further about the relationship between the human and/as the montage during the Bichos symposium that took place at the ICI Berlin in June 2023. See Bichos: Animal Fantasies between Art and Madness, symposium, ICI Berlin, 14–15 June 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e230614>. ↵
  15. I borrow this phrase from Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky’s keynote lecture, ‘Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny’, presented at Models: World Picture Conference, conference, ICI Berlin, 17–18 November 2023 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e231117-1>. See also Deuber-Mankowsky’s contribution in this volume, p. 31. ↵
  16. Apollon, ‘The Limit’, p. 107. ↵
  17. Ibid., p. 104. ↵
  18. Especially in his later work, in the 1960s and 1970s, Lacan increasingly turned to topological figures, such as the Möbius strip, the torus, and the Klein bottle, to visualize the structure of the unconscious and the stakes of psychoanalytic treatment. Interestingly, Clark’s work Caminhando (Walking), from 1963, invites participants to make a Möbius strip using a white strip of paper, because the strip ‘breaks our spatial habits […] It makes us live the experience of a time without limit and of a continuous space.’ Lygia Clark, ‘Caminhando’, in Lygia Clark, ed. by Butler and Pérez-Oramas, p. 160. ↵
  19. Sasha J. Langford, ‘The Psychotopology of Climate’, in Lacan and the Environment, ed. by Clint Burnham and Paul Kingsbury (Cham, CH: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), pp. 181–214 (pp. 196–98) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67205-8>. ↵
  20. Librett, ‘The Subject in the Age of World- Formation’, p. 84. ↵
  21. Lucie Cantin, ‘The Drive, the Untreatable Quest of Desire’, in Constructing the Death Drive, ed. by Tracy McNulty, special issue of differences, 28.2 (2017), pp. 24–45 (p. 25) <https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-4151740>. ↵
  22. Negrete, ‘The Aesthetic Pass’, p. 229. ↵
  23. Apollon, ‘The Subject of the Quest’, p. 3. ↵
  24. Negrete, ‘The Aesthetic Pass’, p. 229. ↵
  25. Developing Apollon’s formulation of the aesthetic, Negrete discusses aesthetic production as ‘a plastic practice’ and as a way of ‘altering reality based on an experience without preexistent referents’, in Negrete, ‘The Aesthetic Pass’, p. 229. This approach to the aesthetic resonates with poiesis as the process or act of creation and emergence. ↵
  26. Drawing on Apollon’s framework, McNulty argues that human reality is ‘fundamentally transindividual’ and traversed by the unconscious ‘quest’ of desire. If this quest ‘impacts each and every human being but […] belongs to no one in particular’, it is because it is an expression of experience that takes the subject ‘above and beyond the specific iteration of the human that every culture creates, promotes, and defends to assure its own survival’. McNulty, ‘The Traversal of the Fantasy’, pp. 198–99. ↵
  27. Lispector, The Passion, p. 127. For a discussion of the ‘impersonal’ in Lispector’s writing, see Fernanda Negrete, ‘Approaching Impersonal Life with Clarice Lispector’, in New Encounters Between Philosophy and Literature ii, ed. by Krzysztof Ziarek, special issue of Humanities, 7.2 (2018) <https://doi.org/10.3390/h7020055>. ↵
  28. Freud’s formulation of ‘the other scene’ comes from the work of German experimental psychologist, philosopher, and physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, who insisted that ‘the scene of action of dreams is different from that of waking ideational life’. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. by James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 535–36. ↵
  29. In his essay on sex, psychoanalysis, and new materialism, Nathan Gorelick convincingly suggests that human superiority and exceptionalism are in fact symptoms linked to disavowal of the specifically human ‘ontological negativity’, which my essay discusses in terms of the rupture. See Nathan Gorelick, ‘Why Sex Is Special: Psychoanalysis against New Materialism’, in Subject Lessons: Hegel, Lacan, and the Future of Materialism, ed. by Russell Sbriglia and Slavoj Žižek (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020), pp. 171–89 (p. 177) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctvw1d5dk.11>. ↵
  30. Lispector, The Passion, p. 4. As observed by Marília Librandi, G.H.’s initials might allude to género humano (‘human genus’). See Marília Librandi, Writing by Ear: Lispector and the Aural Novel (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2018), p. 136 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.3138/​9781487514730>. ↵
  31. Lispector, The Passion, pp. 186–89. ↵
  32. I discuss the mural in more detail in my discussion of death, writing, and subjectivity in Lispector’s work, in Marta Aleksandrowicz, ‘To Enter the Core of Death’, in Philosophy with Clarice Lispector, ed. by Fernanda Negrete, special issue of Angelaki, 28.2 (2023), pp. 90–101 <https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192068>. ↵
  33. Lispector, The Passion, p. 32. Interestingly, although Janair’s place of origin is not disclosed in the novel, Lucia Villares notes that Lispector’s description of the chamber suggests that she might be from the northeast, where the majority of domestic workers in Brazil came from. The distinction between G.H.’s and Janair’s climatic, geographic, and socio-economic environments is highlighted in G.H.’s statements about the chamber, which contrast the dryness of the northeast with the humidity of Rio de Janeiro. Indeed, G.H.’s anxiety and discomfort upon entering the room are amplified by the increasing prevalence of dryness, which comes to replace the humidity and moistness that previously filled the air in the woman’s apartment. For more, see Lucia Villares, Examining Whiteness: Reading Clarice Lispector through Bessie Head and Toni Morrison (New York: Legenda, 2011), pp. 83–84. ↵
  34. Villares, Examining Whiteness, p. 2. Although, as Villares points out, especially during the postcolonial, post-slavery Vargas era — which came to an end shortly after the publication of Lispector’s first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart), in 1943 — miscegenation ‘came to be interpreted positively as a harmonizing and integrating mixture regarded as the essence of being Brazilian’, it also tacitly reinforced the racist ideal of whiteness by linking Brazil’s national identity to the gradual process of ‘whitening’, camouflaged in the national discourse of Brazil as a modern, hybrid, multicultural community. Ibid., pp. 30–32. ↵
  35. Ibid., p. 28. Another interesting analysis, by Rodante van der Waal, Kim Schoof, and Aukje van Rooden, approaches Lispector’s novel as the dismantling of ‘the passion of the colonial subject’, restaging G.H.’s passion as ‘an opening up to the world, so much so that the she herself perishes’. See Rodante van der Waal, Kim Schoof, and Aukje van Rooden, ‘When the Egg Breaks, the Chicken Bleeds’, in Philosophy with Clarice Lispector, ed. by Negrete, pp. 57–67 (pp. 57, 62) <https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192064>. ↵
  36. Lispector, The Passion, p. 39. ↵
  37. Ibid., p. 46. ↵
  38. Ibid., p. 60. ↵
  39. In The Passion, the fall of the human montage still depends on tasting and consuming the animal other, a step that is necessary to reconfigure the relation of the narrator to the world and to dissolve hierarchical opposition among humans, and between humans and other-than-human life forms. However, in Lispector’s later novel Água Viva (1973), the narrator crosses a further limit and eats herself, or, more specifically, eats her placenta. Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. by Stefan Tobler (New York: New Directions, 2012). See also Irving Goh, ‘Writing, Touching, and Eating in Clarice Lispector: Água Viva and A Breath of Life’, MLN, 131.5 (2016), pp. 1347–69 <https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2016.0093>. ↵
  40. Lispector, The Passion, pp. 92, 127. ↵
  41. Ibid., p. 184. ↵
  42. Ibid., pp. 184, 128. ↵
  43. Ibid., pp. 43, 92. ↵
  44. Ibid., pp. 128, 45. ↵
  45. Ibid., pp. 43, 89, 13. ↵
  46. Ibid., p. 13. ↵
  47. Ibid., p. 186. ↵
  48. Ibid. ↵
  49. Ibid. ↵
  50. Ibid. ↵
  51. Ibid., p. 184. ↵
  52. Willy Apollon, ‘Positions — 1: Writing and the Voice’, trans. by Heidi Arsenault and Cynthia Mitchell, in Beauty, ed. by Aleksandrowicz and Negrete, pp. 71–95 (pp. 72–73) <https://www.penumbrajournal.org/no-2-beauty> [accessed 24 July 2024]. ↵
  53. Apollon, ‘Positions’, pp. 72–73. ↵
  54. Adam Shellhorse uses the terms ‘limit point’ and ‘fissure’ in reference to the figure of the subaltern in Lispector’s work, in an essay that discusses the social, political, and historical backdrop against which Lispector was writing — including ‘the disavowal of innovative composition’ by the Brazilian literary mainstream of the time. Adam Joseph Shellhorse, ‘Figurations of Immanence: Writing the Subaltern and the Feminine in Clarice Lispector’, in Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), pp. 17–43 (pp. 21, 23) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.2307/​j.ctt1r69xs2.5>. ↵
  55. Apollon, ‘Positions’, p. 74. For a discussion of the political act that creates a path for the expression of solidarity with the human, and that is not authorized by the cultural montage, see McNulty, ‘The Traversal of the Fantasy’, pp. 212–13. ↵
  56. Ibid., p. 160. ↵
  57. Ibid. ↵
  58. Lygia Clark, ‘To Capture a Fragment of Suspended Time’, in Lygia Clark, ed. by Manuel J. Borja-Villel (Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 1998), p. 187. ↵
  59. Similarly to Apollon, Bersani does not limit the aesthetic to works of art, but rather considers it as ‘enabling and exemplifying the ethical positions and commitments’ (Leo Bersani, ‘Preface’, in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), pp. ix–x (p. x) <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7208/​chicago/​9780226043449.001.0001>). He discusses the ‘communication of forms’ (as a ‘solidarity […] of positionings and configurations in space’) in relation to ‘homoness’ as a ‘model for correspondences of being that are by no means limited to relations among persons’ (‘Gay Betrayals’, in ibid., pp. 36–44 (pp. 43–44)). Bersani also engages psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s theory of the enigmatic signifier to consider how mobilization of the ‘masochistic element’ might open the subject to ‘a self-extensibility rather than a paranoid defensiveness’, thus enabling ‘a move into the correspondence of forms’ and new modes of relation. He traces the movement of extensibility and communication of forms in Caravaggio’s painting ‘from the teasingly enigmatic eroticism of the portraits of boys to the nonsexual sensuality of physical contacts, extensions, and correspondences, from a problematic of knowledge (and interiority) to a kind of cartography of the subject, a tracing of spatial connectedness’ (‘A Conversation with Leo Bersani: With Tim Dean, Hal Foster, and Kaja Silverman’, in ibid., pp. 171–86 (pp. 176–77)). Commenting on Clark’s art, Negrete’s recent book, The Aesthetic Clinic, similarly notes that while the aesthetic experience entails ‘a kind of violence or shock to the senses’, this shock has to be distinguished from seducing the participant to ‘morbid curiosity — which leads back into spectacle and does not bring anything new in terms of relation’. See Fernanda Negrete, The Aesthetic Clinic: Feminine Sublimation in Contemporary Writing, Psychoanalysis, and Art (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2020), p. 150 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.1515/​9781438480220>. Indeed, Clark’s participatory practice expands the aesthetic experience beyond the individual who either stages or witnesses the spectacle. ↵
  60. Gullar and others, ‘Neo-Concrete Manifesto’. ↵
  61. Elena Vogman, Dance of Values: Sergei Eisenstein’s Capital Project (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019), p. 41, emphasis in the original. ↵
  62. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th edn (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012), p. 100. ↵
  63. Lispector, The Passion, p. 165. ↵
  64. Jorie Graham, ‘Vertigo’, in The End of Beauty (New York: Ecco Press, 1987), pp. 66–67. ↵
  65. Anahid Nersessian, The Calamity Form: Poetry and Social Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), p. 142 <https:/​/​doi.org/​10.7208/​chicago/​9780226701455.001.0001>. ↵
  66. César Vallejo, ‘And What If After So Many Words…’, trans. by Douglas Lawder and Robert Bly, in Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations [1972] (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), pp. 36–39. ↵

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